What's the best way to judge transit performance?
Mass transit systems (the CTA, Metra and Pace, not to mention the dozen or so other mass transit agencies in Illinois) are just about out of money. They aren't making a big stink about it like they did in 2005 (and they were remarkably successful at framing the entire debate over the state budget, at least in Chicago, where the headlines after the budget was passed in 2005 read: CTA won't shut down), but they are broke.
Why are they broke? The federal government has money to pay for the invasion and occupation of Iraq for years to come, but no money to help cover the cost of buses and trains. As of 1993, the feds stopped paying for any operating support for mass transit. That was a dumb idea. But, what can you do?
They are also broke because the source of their income -- the local sales tax -- is not rising. As you savvy Internet readers go buy things online, you dodge the local sales tax. And, as we move more towards a service and tourism economy, the sales tax (which is for the sale of goods, not services) generates fewer dollars. Ridership is up all over the place, but fares only cover half the cost of the service, and the taxes (the local sales tax) that supports mass transit is flat or shrinking.
We should raise the tax on gasoline or parking so that people who drive pay more of the cost of transit, since really, fares on the CTA or Pace or Metra should be a lot closer to free than they are, as every rider on transit makes life better for everyone else, while every additional driver makes life a little more congested and thus a little worse for everyone else. Ideally, drivers would pay a lot more, and riders, well, maybe they'd even get paid a little something for making life better for everyone else. Or at least they'd ride for free. Illinois took a good step in that direction in the late 90s with Illinois FIRST, a big capital bond that paid for a lot of CTA capital needs like new buses and train stations that is financed by a higher fee for a license plate. That means drivers paid for the cost of infrastructure (lots of roads, but some transit). Our operating budget should move in that direction as well.
In any event, we've got a state policy debate on how, sometime before early 2007 when the FY08 budgets must be created and it becomes very clear and very public just how broke the transit agencies are, we can come up with a lot more money and (here's the fun part) make sure it is spent wisely.
Today's subcommittee hearing of the Mass Transit Committee of the Illinois House started that policy discussion. Triggered by Representative Larry McKeon's HB4663, the subcommittee on Transit Management and Performance discussed how to implement performance measures.
This is an important and intriguing debate, because part of building the case for spending more money on transit (a very good thing, especially transit that's powered by electricity and not Saudi Arabian oil) is to get the best bang for the buck. And right now, the members of the Mass Transit committee, led by Chairwoman Julie Hamos, are looking for good ideas.
Here are a few I have and I encourage you to add your own to the comments and send that over to Representative Hamos' office.
1) All data collected by any transit agency should be available online. It should be open source. Every little bit of data gathered, especially the actual trip times of each run of each bus and train, should be available online.
2) Employee data should be online as well, including salaries and benefit packages of every employee. There's a widespread suspicion that some agencies pay too many administrators too much money. If that suspicion is unfounded, then data will evaporate that objection. If it's true, then that needs to change.
3) The state should set up somewhat arbitrary standards and force every mass transit agency to use them, so that comparing different agencies will be easy. Ideally, every agency in the country would use the same standard.
What else should the state do to make sure that transit agencies work better?I should mention that Representative McKeon's main point was that transit agencies should be planned according to a consumer-driven process. He wants to start the process by determining what the consumer expects (reliable, on-time, cheap and fast travel, presumably), and then work backwards from there in order to figure out what the agency needs to do to make that happen and what reporting processes need to be created to make sure the agency is executing the plan that leads to consumer expectations.
38 comments:
Why are they broke? The federal government has money to pay for the invasion and occupation of Iraq for years to come, but no money to help cover the cost of buses and trains.
The CTA has had problems since Insull. Commuter Rail has had problems since way before RTA. North Shore, CA&E, South Shore... bankruptcies...
Big Problem with the L is no longer goes where people work. Gov simply can't agree on extending the lines to where people want to go anymore....
Linking this age old metropolitian problem to National Defense is was makes Democrats look odd. If FDR had thought like this about transit in the 30s we'd be speaking German today.
And all this time I thought we got into WW2 in the 40's. What stuff!
War started in 39. We should have got in when Hitler went back into the Rhineland in 36 but the pacifists, appeasers, America Firsters kept us out.
Would have been far cheaper war to wage in 36 then 39-45... but someone would have been complaining about the inhumanity of it had we waged it in 36... the money that could have instead been devoted back home.
It doesn't change... except that the Democrats were more militant in 36 and it was Republicans sounding like DJW.
With your suggestion of the imposition of a gas tax and a parking tax, you are suggesting repeating a history of the social engineering thinking that led to regional division the likes of which I have not seen since.
The original Regional Transportation Authority not only had a 5% Motor Fuel Tax (not imposed at first), but it took the first $16 paid for every license plate and gave it to the RTA. (I may be off on the $16, but I can guarantee you that showing how much was being taken from every county made a great hand out Downstate.)
And, there was a parking tax. It was repealed when Downtown businessmen figured out that suburbanites really did not have to drive to Chicago to buy what they wanted.
If you want to be logical about financing mass transit, I would suggest you take a look at Henry George's writings. He suggested taxing only the land, not buildings.
The land closest to public improvements like train tracks or the extension of I-355 would be more valuable than the land farther away.
Being more valuable, its owners would pay more taxes. Being taxed the same, regardless of the improvements built on the land, the landowners, striving to make as much profit as possible, would improve the land as much as possible.
So, taller buildings would be near the infrastructure, for instance.
No reason that transportation improvements that are going to directly benefit those with nearby land should not be taxed to pay for them.
Makes more sense that gasoline and parking taxes that would probably ignite another RTA revolt.
The best way to judge the performance of a transit system is to ride it frequently across its routes and listen to what its riders have to say. Of course, if one did that on the CTA, you would quickly be giving the CTA a failing grade, because you would be forced to see its many shortcomings.
RANDALL SHERMAN
Secretary/Treasurer, Illinois Committee for Honest Government
Frank Zeidler was the Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee from 1948 until 1960. He didn't drive. He always took the bus.
I object to any increase in taxes to support the CTA until there is adult management at the CTA.
As that is not likely to happen...how about privatizing the CTA? It was private up to about 1933.
JBP
The last two years the RTA sent a bus onto the closed college campus grounds of Barat College in Lake Forest. It would stop. It would wait. It would take off.
It picked up nobody because the school has been shuttered. It dropped off nobody because the school was shuttered. The driver(s) apparantly didn't bother to tell anyone the school was closed. If they told someone, the bus certainly was not rerouted to pick up potential commuters/riders elsewhere. You would have thought that the bus driver would have noticed that no cars were in the parking lots and no one ever was walking around or even mowing the lawn? Just the past few weeks when this matter became public in a local paper, did the RTA then spring into action! How much money was blown on this stupidity? And how many other examples are there where the stupidity adds up to real dollars lost?
Want to know the problems with public transportation? It could care less about the customers it serves or where its customers are. The majority of routes for trains and CTA "els" still go downtown. The majority of commuters heading to work leave from one suburban location to another.
Then they come begging for monies because they are broke. Perhaps they are broke because the example I gave above is but one of many that can repeated over and over again?
How about a universal transfer pass between these various public transportation agencies? Or making sure you can always transfer from one form of public transportation to another (i.e. step off a bus and board a train or another bus). Or making sure that a bus is present when the train pulls up at a few busier stations?
How about extending bus routes the CTA runs on major streets well into the suburbs. Like the Irving Park bus going to Schiller Park and beyond? The Lincoln Avenue bus going all the way to Dempster Street? The Milwaukee Avenue bus going all the up into Lake County to Libertyville? These are not new ideas.
But don't worry. A new "crisis" will pour money into a system that should be overhauled. And we all be left bitching and moaning well into the future about public transportation.
Louis G. Atsaves
I the Lake Street L renovation was a mistake. I remember crows coming on and off in the 60s when people worked downtown and lake street itself was lined with factories.
Those days are gone and the money should have been spent getting people out of the city to jobs in the burbs.
Capital planning is never easy for Government, and it's a disaster in NE Illinois.
Remember the Cross-Town expressway?
It could have been built with light rail down the center (someone recall? this may have been in the plan).
I think of it every time I drive from Oak Park to Evanston, and how
I opposed it because I bought the progressive line that it was racist... a plot to keep African-Americans east of Cicero Ave as though they couldn't cross an overpass....
...that's the kind of odd ball politics our major capital planning initiatives run up against in Illinois.
I mean, I think... and crow is crowds...
...eating lunch while typing...crumbs all over the key board.
JB,
It sure was private. Also bankrupt and source of ongong political scandals... local transit dominated local politics then.
I like the idea of a universal fare pass that Louis Atsaves raises. Representatives Hamos and Bassi worked to get a good report done on the possibilities of a universal fare pass. The problem is that Metra has an open system (just get on the train and show your ticket to a conductor) while Pace and the CTA run closed systems (you need to buy a ticket to get in). They are hard to integrate. There are smaller steps that can and should be taken (monthly Metra passes should be a magnetic strip that can be used on CTA/Pace, for example). But Bill Baar, money is money, and when the federal government is absolutely broke because (a) we're spending $40 billion a month on our military adventures that are not helping us attack terrorism and (b) we continue to cut marginal tax rates on the wealthiest, and the federal government doesn't support the operating costs of transit, that's not 'odd' that's just the priorities of the federal government. It's odd to pretend that transit funding is somehow divorced from the federal budget. And I also think that the anecdotes about unhappy customers (there are a ton of happy customers, by the way) and the Barat College bus run suggests there ought to be a systematic method that the public and riders can comment and suggest improvements for each route in a more transparent fashion than is currently the case. Transit should be more open source.
I remember this promise of RTA referendum backers that gains support here:
"...a universal transfer pass between these various public transportation agencies..."
Supporters of the tax hike put it this way in 1974:
"Transportation, when and where you want it, throughout the region."
It was garbage then and it is today, 32 years after the promise was make.
The RTA was created so the CTA could get enough money to continue overnight service. I even found that Milton Pikarsky memo and it's sitting somewhere in the NIU Historial Library.
I won't hold my breath until the outer suburbs get their fair share of RTA money...say, the amount they pay in.
Just an example of overcharging. Metra changes the same amount per passenger mile, although the biggest cost is pulling the train out of the station. Instead of charging the marginal cost for going from Woodstock to Harvard, for example, the commuters are charged on a per mile basis. (Certainly, the entire cost of the track should be charged to those commuting from the exurbs, but I believe marginal costs should apply to operating costs. The trains do move a lot more quickly in the outer counties than they do closer to Chicago.)
RTA remains now, as it always has been, a way to bail out the Chicago Transit Authority.
Dan,
How often you ride public transportation?
Do you ride the L at off hours?
As far as the military budget goes...
...there was serious talk in the late 40s and early 50s on why we needed conventional military anymore anyways. Just build a nuclear stockpile and if threatened, obliterate the opponent.
It's very much what Pat Buchanan and the left neo-isolationists are leading up to today.
A cheap Military based on overwhelming threat of anniliation, and use the money for folks back home.
It's musculear isolationism and will probably be the Democrats Platform in 2008.
It's a frightful doctrine and we may well find a Democratic President use it on Iran.
Think about it when you ride the bus.
As a suburbanite that takes Metra to work every day, I love it. But I'm one of the few lucky enough to live and work along the same train line.
One problem with mass transit in general seems to be that the different systems don't integrate at all. My wife worked for a while on the Museum Campus and it would often take less time for her to go between Geneva and Ogilvie than between Ogilvie and the museum. Most of that time would be spent waiting for a bus to appear and actually stop instead of just blowing by.
It'd be nice if, when a train stops at a station, if it was scheduled so that any buses that stop at or near that train station would appear at the same time or just a couple minutes later.
The Pace buses in the suburbs don't do this, and are generally considered by worthless by most everybody. If they disappeared few would notice. Transferring from one bus to another often requires an hour or two of milling about so that only those who don't have cars would ever consider it viable...if it happened to take them where they wanted and they had half a day to waste. They really need to be timed better. If there are not enough people to make a route viable, it should be eliminated instead of running once every two hours.
Determining where people want or need to go seems to not be a consideration either by looking at a map. To create viable routes, Pace should survey major employers, schools, or any place where large numbers of people congregate on a daily basis and find out where the people there are coming from. Figure out if there are any bus lines that could be created based off this information.
As for raising gas taxes, I'm torn, while I agree with it on an ideological level, on a practical level it's not like most people have a choice. They're being punished for a behavior they can't change. If I ever switched my job I'd be driving again too.
bill barr,
I am glad we resolved all those scandals from years ago and live in such a law-abiding state now ;-)
Weren't most of the "scandals" related to the desire of the City of Chicago and State of Illinois to increase regulation and taxes? Maybe our illustrious leaders could step back for once and let the market work.
You cannot have ethically challenged people like Victor Reyes doing a half a Billion of interests in lobbying before the CTA and than being a Board member (or Sam Panayotivich former Democratic/Republican State Rep on 4 payrolls at once and one time gopher for Fast Eddie Vrdolyak)
or Republican fundraisers
all who have no knowledge or vested interest in Transportation
Victor Reyes alderman Danny clueless Solis allowed all the CTA cuts in Hispanic areas including night and weekend service while trying to force cabbies to go into minority areas (which rarely happens)--why cut the transportation
Bizarre,
HDO has ex-cons on the payroll. JCDecauex has hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts because of politically connected lobbyists
At least Frank arrogant incompetent Kruesi sweetened hsi pension.
Transportation, like education, should be viewed as what is supposed to be used for NOT contracts, jobs for ex-cons and a job for Frank Kruesi or a Board seat (with pension and health benefits) for Victor conflict of interest Reyes.
Administrators definitely make too much money.
The arrogant stupid leadership of Kruesi doesn't listen to the riders.
LISTEN TO THE RIDERS.
DONT MAKE THE CTA THE POLITICAL PLAYGROUND OF DALEY AND CORRUPT CRONIES>
They want to measure performance for what? So that "Mother Theresa with a Switch Blade" can politic some more with taxpayer's money? You think any of the geniuses who sold the jobs poor skyway or tollway would sell off the railways and busways and airports? Maybe with all the sweet jobs and sweet deals it's not in the Public Interest eh? Maybe we got the downtown version of Dick Cheney's company running things here too. They're making loads of money in the middleast. Maybe all you have to do is get the Bond guys to give you their performance criteria for pricing the bonds. Supply and demand. That should work just fine don't you think?
Not a single word in the article about the waste and inefficiency of the bloated bureaucracies that run the transit systems or the outmoded route designs and service models, or user fare increases. Blaming the Federal Government, which DOES provide hard-earned taxpayer funds for capital improvements is disingenuous.
Do you really think people in Alaska or Mississippi give a hoot about the CTA? Do you really think that all the gasoline tax monies collected in Illinois go to transportation or roads?
Much of the regional transit system was designed a century ago, long before suburban development crossed the Des Plaines River, let alone the Fox River.
The recent addition and expansion of the North Central commuter line to Antioch was the first new commuter rail line since 1926! The system design is old, it serves only a small fraction of the regional population, and it is poorly run. Address those issues first, then talk about further subsidies. As it is, it already costs drivers $40/day for a 20-mile commute downtown.
Frank Kruesi should resign. That needs to come first.
Kruesi is despicable.
Dan Jonson Weinberger, don't you work for the HDO Senator that is part of Victor Reyes on the CTA board, and ex-cons getting jobs after they are fired from the city?
For some anonymous commentators, it's always about Victor Reyes. Who, by the way, is not a Board member of the CTA. So, what suggestions do you have, anon 11:49 am, for improving the transit system? I assume you like the STAR line and the Circle Line, both of which need capital dollars to build but then a ton of operating dollars to operate. Where will we get those operating dollars? And frankly, I don't care if Alaska or Alabama cares about the CTA or Metra. I do. So I want the federal government to care as well.
The federal government should care and they continuously put-up. But so should the locals who control the transit agencies by proposing projects that are designed to get more new users to more places where they are going, not to serve the same people with more options to the get to the same places because its easy. Get it? So splain that to Mother Theresa and see if she cares about that more than than the political interests ie. her freinds and their freinds who do the bonding, consulting and realestating.
Victor Reyes was on the CTA board until he was forced to resign because of the ethics laws concerning lobbyists. He did nothing but make money their and oversaw bad management, increased pensions for Kruesi, and cuts in service to Hispanics and low income people.
Hey sell out Dan, wait until Eddie Garza beats your obese arrogant guy next time.
What do you think about HDO ex cons like Gilbert Valadez who got fired from the city and are working at the CTA? Or Degnans brother having a pension and a CTA salary and questionable skills?
THat is where you waste money.
The Transit Issue is not about Money for Transit its just about Money for Money. Gone are the days when colorful hacks could just hack off their share with flair. And their less sophisticated progeny (trucks, sewers and ashphalt) are just about extinct. Even HDO, already by now an anachronism, who used minority political empowerment as a niche for good'ole hackdom is well on its way to being overrun by new age hacks. Like Mother Theresa with a Switch Blade (D-Evanston) who has been perfecting the art of "Shrouding" with worthy causes. The new age 21st century hacks are backed by Bonds $ and fronted by bearded and bow-tied Consultants and operatives with chorus lines recruited from Georgetown, MIT and UofC. So and a 1 and a 2 and a All_Together_Now. Repeat. All_Together_Now!
The big money hacks are bad too.
I noticed that Dan Weinberg started to stutter and shut up when someone started mentioning his connection to HDO and working for Sandoval and Reyes. The election was fixed against Eduardo Garza and they are going to go into court to make it right.
Victor Reyes hurt public transportation along with his other cronies.
Metra is fairly well run, I like also you can drink beer.
It is interesting that Danny Boy Weinstein starts to cry when his hypocricy with HDO and Victor Reyes gets pointed out. He is an unabashed apologist for the Senator nicknamed Fat Bastard (from Austin Powers fame) Working for HDO is akin to working for organized crime or terrorists.
Do,Re,Mi,Fa,So... Right then, in the key of C. All_Together_Now. Just like in Evanston. Ready?
Bonds-Bonds_Bonds_Bonds-Bonds!
Bonds-Bonds_Bonds_Bonds-Bonds!
One more time! For Mother Theresa and Kreusi-fiction!
You got it right, white collar crime and patronage through bond work, legal contracts, lobbying for contracts, pension fund investing--all at a great cost to the taxpayer
Victor Reyes is all wrapped in all of it, but the average blue collar joe doesn't get it for or against
Poor Dan Johnson Weinberger, he got scared off his own posting.
Maybe Eddie Garza slapped him
Dan lost all credibility by being the progressive puppet for HDO
DJW frequently makes anti-Israel comments on his blog.
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